Happy New Year!

We made it - it is now 2021, a new year after a very turbulent time last year.  Honestly, though - the world isn't suddenly going to improve because we flipped over a page on the calendar, is it?  Without even the benefit of a crystal ball I suspect that much of this year will be a repeat of last year.

Oh well.  We can each only do what we can to make our own little corner bearable, can't we?

The last houses of the old year......

......finished on New Year's Eve.  Two more have been cut out and wil be made this week.

We received a Christmas package from our son and his family down in Canberra, and one of the items was a bird feeder woven from grey-washed willow with a metal seed tray inside, and a bag of native bird seed.  

I had to take this from inside the house looking through a window - because you can bet your boots that, as soon as I opened the door to get a better picture, those rainbow lorikeets would have flown straight off.  It hangs in the we-think-it-was-an-apricot-tree which has now well and truly died off, but the birds love perching in the branches so we haven't removed it.  However, when it rains (which it has rather a lot lately) we bring the feeder onto the verandah.  The birds are still welcome to dine but they haven't yet done so, although we do have a few species (not these parrots) which dive and swoop under the roof looking for insects.

Did you all have a good Christmas?  Ours was quiet; we went to lunch at a nice restaurant, the food was excellent, the service let it down a couple of times, but overall it was very enjoyable.

It was followed a couple of days later by lunch with visiting friends at a town an hour away.  We don't miss living in the Big Smoke at all -we've been here over ten years now and wouldn't go back - but we do miss time with friends, so catching up with them is good especially as the folk festival we like attending won't be held until......we don't know when.  Certainly not at Easter, possibly not even later in the year.

I decided years ago not to bother with new year resolutions, and have been very good about sticking with that.  However each year I do have hopes, and this year there are a few hopeful projects to work on.  The handwork on the tumbler quilt is nearly all done so another project will be needed in to take to quilt group, which will mean taking a machine.  'Imprismed', being easy foundation piecing, will fill the bill nicely and I can work on more complex Stuff at home.  I could, of course, add the borders to the tumbler quilt by hand to keep it going......in my dreams......

Kevin's digging into his circus family history has been continuing, and we found about an incident which happened in 1923.  Blayney isn't very big now and was even smaller then when the circus under its owners Charles Perry and William Sole stopped to perform; Charles had just sold it to William who was married to Charles' sister Elizabeth, but had stayed on for a month or two to help.  They had set up in a paddock near the railway, it was 2nd June, early winter, and it was dark.  The electricity plant they used for lighting wasn't working so they brought out an acetylene gas generator.  It didn't work, they couldn't see where the problem was, someone struck a match to provide light......and boom.  Charles and William both died.  We found several newspaper reports of the tragedy, most of which make quite lurid reading.  Both men are buried in a single grave at Blayney cemetery so, if we are able to take our planned trip to Canberra in April as we hope (there's another of those Hopes), we will stop to pay our respects.  Charles and William both left adult children so Elizabeth, with her children and those of her brother, continued to run the circus.

Continuing on from last year:

"Wines at dinner.

If the guests should include one or more people of well-known temperance principles, in deference to the scruples of these guests, wines or liquors should not be brought to the table.  People who entertain should also be cautious as to serving wines at all.  It is impossible to tell what harm you may do to some of your highly esteemed guests.  It may be that your palatable wines may create an appetite for the habitual use of wines or stronger alcoholic liquors; or you may renew a passion long controlled and entombed; or you may turn a wavering will from a seemingly steadfast resolution to forever abstain.  This is an age of reforms, the temperance reform being by no means the least powerful of these, and no ladies or gentlemen will be censured or misunderstood if they neglect to supply their dinner table with wine; it may be on the sideboard, however, and guests may be asked whether they will partake of it."

No such thing as 'Mocktails' in those far-off days, were there?

Enjoy your days!